Icilio Federico Joni, known as the prince of Sienese fakers, ca. 1909. He used cigar stumps to make glaze for gold.
ARCHIVIO JONI


Fakes, Frauds, and Fake Fakers

Some counterfeiters try to enter the “soul and mind of the artist.” Some delight in the chemistry of baking paint and creating wormholes. Some start with real pictures and then “restore” them until they look as if they’re by a different artist. From ancient vases to conceptual art—if someone made it, someone else has tried to bamboozle the world with a copy
By Milton Esterow


Icilio Federico Joni, known as the prince of Sienese fakers, ca. 1909. He used cigar stumps to make glaze for gold.
ARCHIVIO JONI
I n Italy,” Salvatore Casillo, who founded the University of Salerno’s Museum of Fakes, recently commented, “if you’re a good enough counterfeiter, you eventually get your own show.”

Casillo was right. Several good-enough counterfeiters have recently had their own shows.

Icilio Federico Joni, who was known as the prince of Sienese fakers and specialized in Renaissance paintings until he died in 1946, got his own show last year. He was the star of “Authentic Fakes” at the Santa Maria della Scala museum in Siena, where he is considered something of a folk hero.

Joni was so good that Old Master experts have called him one of the art world’s most spectacularly inventive forgers.

Meanwhile, Joseph van der Veken, who died in 1964, got his own show, “Fake/Not Fake: Restorations, Reconstructions, Forgeries,” which ended last February at the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, Belgium.

“From what we can tell, he always said he never put anything on the market that was a fake,” Till-Holger Borchert, the museum’s conservator, said in a telephone interview. “On the other hand, things came on the market and were sold as a Bouts or Massys or Memling or others.”

And John Myatt, a convicted forger who once said, “You wake up in the morning and you just feel like today is a Picasso day, today is a Monet day,” spent four months in jail and then exhibited his fakes at a gallery in England in 2003. By then the forgeries contained a microchip so that they could not be mistaken for the real thing. Prices for the fakes ranged from around $1,000 to $10,000. He has used K-Y jelly to add body to his brushstrokes.

Even the infamous Vermeer forger, Han van Meegeren, who died in 1947, got a show of his works, both real and fake, at the Kunsthalle in Rotterdam in 1996. There is also a market for van Meegeren fakes. His “Vermeer” Last Supper sold at auction for $88,000 some years ago.

The late Eric Hebborn, another gifted forger who bamboozled the art world for years, has not yet had a show, but his Art Forger’s Handbook has just been published in paperback by Overlook Press.

Hebborn, who has been called a “fake faker,” made drawings that he attributed to Brueghel, Piranesi, Pontormo, and Corot, among many others.

He was so good that Eugene Victor Thaw, the retired art dealer, collector, and philanthropist, told Ronald D. Spencer in his book The Expert Versus the Object that Hebborn’s career was “still troubling the art market.”

Other forgers are also still troubling the art market, judging by an ARTnews survey of dealers, auction-house officials, museum curators, conservators, scholars, and former agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Scotland Yard.

Colonel Ferdinando Musella, one of the world’s top hunters of art forgers and art thieves, said in a telephone interview in Rome, that the “faking of contemporary paintings has increased, especially prints.”

Musella is operations chief of Italy’s investigative squad officially known as Comando Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale, or Command for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage.

Despite the increase in forgeries, Thaw and other art observers say that things have improved. “The situation is much better than it has been,” he said.

“With Old Master paintings, it’s just about over,” says Marco Grassi, a New York conservator who has studios in New York and Paris. “Forgery is much more difficult because we have so many tools to discover them. (See article page 106.) It’s impossible to imagine a Picasso painting coming out of the woodwork that nobody has ever seen. It’s inconceivable that someone would get away with it.”

Among those who fooled some people recently but did not get away with it was a New York dealer who bought authentic pieces by such artists as Chagall, Renoir, and Gauguin at auction and then sold forgeries of them. For example, according to the FBI, the dealer bought an authentic Chagall in 1990 for $312,000, had it copied by a forger, and sold the forgery for $514,000 in 1993. Five years later he sold the authentic Chagall for $340,000.

Less expensive work came from a man in Marseille, who made crude installations of works by the sculptor César by beating vintage cars with a hammer and jumping on coffee machines.

Last year in Florence Musella’s squad seized hundreds of fake paintings, including some purportedly by Andy Warhol, which were offered for sale by a television station. He said that last August the Carabinieri found thousands of fake works, mainly prints, all over Italy, of Warhol, Mario Schifano, Enrico Baj, and others.


Casillo, of the Museum of Fakes, says that the forged works he has dealt with include “Miró in particular, then Picasso, Matisse, Léger, Dalí, Hartung, Appel, Warhol, and, most recently, Joseph Kosuth.” Among the Italian artists most commonly faked, he says, are Schifano, Carlo Carrà, and Lucio Fontana.

In the past seven years Musella’s squad has sequestered more than 60,000 fakes—many of contemporary Italian artworks. “Bulgaria,” Musella says, “has become a source for counterfeit ancient Greek and Roman coins.”


Musella and Casillo work closely. Casillo has been appointed judicial custodian of seized fakes of all kinds. He has vaults at the University of Salerno, where evidence is held for the trials of forgers.

Casillo is a sociologist who founded the museum, an adjunct of the university and its center for the study of forgery, 14 years ago. He is a professor and lectures on industrial sociology. He initially became interested in faking and counterfeiting in the business world.

One of Italy’s more prolific fakers was Icilio Federico Joni. He began his career in the late 19th century by making imitations of the tavolette de Biccherna, wood covers used for the Sienese tax accounts that were made from the mid-13th to the end of the 17th centuries.

Joni was a flamboyant character whose autobiography, Affairs of a Painter, published in 1936, would make a stunning Hollywood epic. How much of it is fiction is not known, but it makes for entertaining reading.

Besides being a painter, gilder, and restorer with assorted mistresses, he played the mandolin, produced pageants, and kept falcons in his studio, which was also a gymnasium equipped with a set of dumbbells. In his book he offered helpful hints, such as “A good glaze for the gold was also produced by keeping the stump of Tuscan cigars in water for several days.”

The book was reissued in English and Italian for “Authentic Fakes,” with an introduction by the show’s curator, Gianni Mazzoni, who is a professor of the history of modern art at the University of Siena.

Although Joni was arrested a few times for altercations—he obviously had a temper—he was never accused of forgery. Why?


“He only made original work that seemed to be old, and as they went from dealer to dealer, they became old,” Mazzoni said in a telephone interview.

“I’ve been doing research on Joni for 20 years,” Mazzoni says. “Joni had three children. One of them was named Fiorenzo, an artist who painted on glass. Fiorenzo was born in 1918, the day his father sold a forgery in the style of Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, a Renaissance artist from Umbria.”

One of Joni’s most famous productions was Madonna and Child with Angels, which was acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art in a bequest of James Parmalee as a work of Sano di Pietro (1406–81). It was discovered to be a forgery in 1948. The museum found that the cracquelure of the Madonna’s blue coat was produced by baking, which was a favorite method of Joni’s, and that modern nails secured the framing elements of the panel.

Is there a monument to Joni in Siena? “No,” says Mazzoni, “and we have no streets named after him, but it could possibly happen in the future.”

There are no streets named after Joseph van der Veken in Belgium, but, like Joni, he is considered a supremely gifted restorer. David Bull, a New York conservator and former chairman of painting conservation at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., says van der Veken’s technique was at times quite miraculous. Was he a faker of 15th- and 16th-century Flemish art? The late Max Friedlander, the legendary art historian, thought so. But not everyone agrees. The recent show at the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, “Fake/Not Fake,” did not give a yes or no answer. There were eight paintings and 25 drawings in the show.

“One got the impression that he not only was a good conservator but had a keen eye on how to promote himself,” says Borchert, who curated the exhibition. “His image was that of a handy craftsman who was a master at restoring primitives.

“Our point is that it is quite difficult to define authentication. We see old works restored to an extent that the original appears to have been hampered. We are looking at work that is more the work of the restorer than the artist. We explore the twilight zone between falsification on the one hand and modern-day restoration on the other hand.

“The degree of restoration made it a problem to determine whether the work is original or fake. Some works indicated 20 percent restoration, others 80 percent. At what percentage is it a fake? That’s a good question. Tell me.”

Any conclusion to the show? “We have put the question to the public: What you are looking at is not necessarily what you think you are looking at.” Borchert says that after the panel of the Just Judges of van Eyck’s masterpiece Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, painted in the early 15th century, was stolen in 1934, van der Veken volunteered to paint a copy. “It’s extraordinary what he did,” said David Bull. “I was told that cracks had formed in the paint and that paint was lifting from the surface in exactly the same way as the original.”

If there is ambiguity about van der Veken, there is none about Eric Hebborn, who died under mysterious circumstances in 1996.

Hebborn was a rogue who had no limits to his skulduggery. He produced more than a thousand forgeries—at least that’s what he boasted.

Charley Hill, a private investigator based in London and formerly a top member of Scotland Yard’s art-and-antiques theft squad, recommended contacting Leo Stevenson for comment on Hebborn. Stevenson, he says, “is a well-known copyist who makes fakes for people who want reproductions on the wall while the real things are hidden away. Even the Foreign Office in London has bought things from him to protect their assets.”

Stevenson, who lives in London, says he doesn’t do copies but “inventions in the style of Old Masters.”

“I once met Hebborn,” Stevenson said. “He was a strange man. It didn’t help that we were both drunk. I was not impressed with the book. I think he was deliberately trying to mislead people because he didn’t want them to tread into his territory. He was a talented draftsman. He writes about his techniques, but some of them don’t make sense.

“Hebborn was wrong to say that flake white should be used by forgers for Old Masters. Flake white is normally a mixture of lead carbonate and zinc-oxide whites. Zinc oxide was not commonly used before the 20th century, and its use in oil paint is completely unknown before about 1830, so if a fake that purported to be from before this date contained this pigment, someone should be arrested.

“I think he was deliberately misleading in order to protect his own nefarious activities. He keeps hinting that he sold many major works to major galleries and museums, but he doesn’t say who or where or what. Either he was really very naughty and wanted to cover his tracks or he was a fake faker. My hunch? The latter.

“He left out all sorts of tricks forgers use, little technical things. If you want to make a canvas brittle, you bake it—80 degrees centigrade—for a day. You can spray it with vinegar. Also, you can apply urine to the surface, which will accelerate deterioration of the surface to make the painting look older.”

Another fake faker was a 19th-century Belgian artist named A. Beers. According to art historian Hans Tietze, because Beers didn’t have time to fill all his commissions, he had inferior artists make copies of his paintings. “When they were well done he signed them himself,” Tietze wrote. “When they were not, he had the copyists sign them with his name. Thus, if they aroused suspicion, he could disown them. By this procedure, Beers himself helped to forge genuine—and even false—Beers.”

When forger David Stein was sent to prison years ago, Joseph Stone, the New York City assistant district attorney who prosecuted him, said, “What I find so pathetic about the Stein case and other fraud cases is that while the victims relied on the false representations of the defendant, the victims were also blinded by the inexorable craving for bargains in art. Their lack of knowledge in what they were purchasing, their unwillingness to seek expert advice, their gullibility made them easy victims of Stein, who had become an overnight wonder in the art world.”

This article has been abridged for the ARTnews Web site.

Milton Esterow is editor and publisher of ARTnews. Additional reporting by Milton Gendel in Rome and Ken Bensinger in Mexico City.

Gen. John P. Abizaid

June 24, 2005
U.S. General Sees No Ebb in Fight
By DAVID S. CLOUD and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, June 23 – The top American commander for the Middle East said Thursday that the insurgency in Iraq had not diminished, seeming to contradict statements by Vice President Dick Cheney in recent days that the insurgents were in their “last throes.”

Though he declined during his Congressional testimony to comment directly on Mr. Cheney’s statements, the commander, Gen. John P. Abizaid, said that more foreign fighters were coming into Iraq and that the insurgency’s “overall strength is about the same” as it was six months ago. “There’s a lot of work to be done against the insurgency,” he added.

His more pessimistic assessment, made during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, reflected a difference of emphasis between military officers, who battle the intractable insurgency every day, and civilian officials intent on accentuating what they say is unacknowledged progress in Iraq.

Mr. Cheney, in an interview with CNN after General Abizaid spoke, repeated his assertion that the insurgency was facing defeat, which he said was driving it to increase attacks to disrupt the United States-backed political process aimed at defusing the violence.

“If you look at what the dictionary says about throes, it can still be a violent period,” he said in the interview. “The terrorists understand if we’re successful at accomplishing our objective, standing up a democracy in Iraq, that that’s a huge defeat for them. They’ll do everything they can to stop it.”

Persuading the public that the American-led effort in Iraq is succeeding is a White House priority this month. President Bush will meet Friday with the Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, at the White House, and on Tuesday, he will give a speech on the first anniversary of the end of the American occupation.

Dr. Jaafari, speaking at the Council of Foreign Relations here, supported the White House argument that the situation in Iraq was steadily improving, despite continuing attacks. He also warned against setting a timetable for troop withdrawal. When he was asked Thursday evening about Mr. Cheney’s recent comments, he sidestepped the issue.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his top commanders appeared at all-day hearings, starting with the Senate Armed Services Committee in the morning and continuing with the House Armed Services Committee in the afternoon.

“Any who say that we’ve lost this war, or that we’re losing this war, are wrong – we are not,” Mr. Rumsfeld said in the morning session.

He added that consideration of troop reductions in Iraq, as some Democrats have called for, would “throw a lifeline to terrorists, who in recent months have suffered significant losses and casualties, been denied havens and suffered weakened popular support.”

General Abizaid had just returned from a visit to Iraq, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa, where he said he was surprised at how many American commanders and soldiers asked whether the military was losing support at home for their missions overseas. “It was a real concern,” he said.

He added that Afghan and Iraqi military officers had raised the same concern. “They worry we don’t have the staying power to see the mission through,” he said.

Several lawmakers warned that public support for the American troop presence in Iraq would continue to decline, which could eventually force a withdrawal of the troops, unless progress could be made at stemming the violence.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, told Mr. Rumsfeld at the Senate Committee hearing: “We will lose this war if we leave too soon, and what is likely to make us leave too soon? The public going south. That is happening, and it worries me greatly.”

No senator called for an American withdrawal, but several Democrats urged the administration to consider setting a timetable for troop reductions if Iraqi officials fail to approve a constitution by a self-imposed August deadline, which could be extended for six months. The constitution is scheduled to be voted on in October, and if it is approved, a national election would be held in December.

“An open-ended commitment to the Iraqis that we will be there even if they fail to agree on a constitution would lessen the chances that the Iraqis will make the political compromises necessary to defeat the jihadists and end the insurgency,” said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.

Dr. Jaafari urged the United States on Thursday night not to set a timetable for a troop withdrawal, saying insurgents would seize on the action to “spread terror across the nation to weaken the country.”

He said the only viable military strategy was to wait until Iraqi troops are “trained to a very high level,” a process he insisted was already well under way.

His reluctance to set deadlines appeared synchronized with the position taken by Mr. Bush, who has declined to set a goal for withdrawal.

Yet despite his care not to differ with the White House, Dr. Jaafari appeared at one point to side with General Abizaid, who told Congress that foreign fighters were still entering Iraq. Mr. Jaafari agreed that Iraq’s borders were still not secure and that terrorists continued to flow into Iraq. He made no effort to quantify how many have entered the country, or how important they have been in the insurgency.

In the afternoon session, Representative Loretta Sanchez, a California Democrat, repeatedly pressed Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in Iraq, on whether the insurgency was in its final throes, as Mr. Cheney said, or was essentially holding its own, as another top American officer, Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, stated this week.

Pressed repeatedly to choose between the two, General Casey said: “There’s a long way to go here. Things in Iraq are hard.”

But General Casey insisted that the allied forces had significantly weakened the insurgency even though the number of attacks against American forces has remaining steady at about 60 a day for the last several weeks.

The most heated exchange of the day occurred between Mr. Rumsfeld and Senator Edward M. Kennedy. After a six-minute recitation of what he said were Mr. Rumsfeld’s mistakes and misjudgments, the senator, a Massachusetts Democrat, accused him of putting “our forces and our national security in danger” and called for Mr. Rumsfeld to resign, as he has several times previously.

“Well, that is quite a statement,” Mr. Rumsfeld responded, saying Mr. Bush has rebuffed his offers to resign twice.

David E. Sanger contributed reporting for this article.

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Muhammed Uraibi/Associated Press

An Iraqi came to the aid of a man whose clothes were on fire yesterday after four car bombs exploded in central Baghdad

June 24, 2005
Four Car Bombs Explode in Central Baghdad, Killing 17
By JOHN F. BURNS and JAMES GLANZ

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 23 – Four car bombs exploded in a central Baghdad commercial district early Thursday morning, spewing shattered glass and bits of human skin over the streets while killing at least 17 people. The bombings raised the toll in the capital to at least 43 dead and 100 wounded in a string of similar attacks that began Wednesday night.

The car bombs blew up in quick succession outside two Shiite mosques, next to a police patrol near a gas station and adjacent to an old supermarket in the Karrada neighborhood, an Interior Ministry official said. On a day when dust storms left a stifling gray pall over the city, the stench of the fires and human remains in Karrada was overwhelming.

Shortly after the thud of the explosions, which from a distance sounded like a volley of shells dropped from some great bomb bay, a woman named Um Ahmed frantically searched for her son, Ahmed, who tended a small cosmetics stand in the area. “No one knows where my son is?” Um Ahmed said. “He sets off to work at 6 a.m. He is only 8.”

The attacks demonstrate the insurgents’ ability to strike at will across the capital despite a monthlong crackdown by United States and Iraqi troops that commanders have said has been aimed primarily at curbing car bombings. In Baghdad alone, an insurgent offensive aimed at destabilizing the new Shiite majority government killed more than 700 people in the past month, most of them in car bombings.

The United States military command, eager to show progress against the insurgents when Congressional critics of the war have been pressing their doubts in Washington, found solace on Thursday in an unexpected quarter. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born militant who has been named Al Qaeda’s chief in Iraq by Osama bin Laden, said in a posting on the Internet that one of Saudi Arabia’s most-wanted militants had been killed by a coalition airstrike in Qaim, on the Syrian border.

The posting contended that the militant, Sheik Abdulla al-Rushood, fought a recent United States-led offensive in Qaim. Ultimately, the posting said, the Americans “bombed the locations of the mujahedeen with jet fighters, and our happy sheik got what he always wished for.” Jihadist literature often promotes the joys of dying in a battle against infidels or other enemies.

A car bomb also went off Thursday morning near Kirkuk in the north, killing three Iraqis and wounding eight, said Maj. Safaa Mawlood of the Iraqi Army. Still another car bomb attacked a United States Army convoy in Falluja late on Thursday afternoon, a witness said. No casualties were reported.

Also on Thursday, a group of influential Arab Sunnis agreed on a slate of names that they expect will be added to a committee of legislators that will write Iraq’s constitution. The committee originally consisted of 55 members of the National Assembly, which is dominated by Arab Shiites and Kurds because Iraq’s Sunnis largely boycotted the elections in January.

But the committee eventually agreed to add 15 Sunnis with full membership rights, with an additional 10 as advisers or specialists – all in hopes of drawing Sunnis, who make up most of the country’s violent insurgency, into the political process. After much haggling among the dozens of secular, religious and tribal Sunnis chosen to pick the names, a list of 15 full members was submitted to the committee on Thursday, said two original members of the committee who have negotiated with the Sunnis.

The Sunni leaders also came up with 13 proposed advisers rather than 10. Nearly all of the Sunnis, historically fractious, agreed on the names, said Abdul Khalid Zangana, one of the two negotiators from the committee. One group from Mosul, unhappy with the number of members it had been allocated, refused to endorse the agreement, he said.

“There were reservations from some of them, but they were a minority,” he said.

By prior agreement, the 15 full members will have the same rights on the committee as the National Assembly members, said Adbul Rahman Said, another negotiator. Perhaps the most prominent person chosen was Kamal Hamdoon, the leader of the Iraqi bar association. Mr. Said said the assembly could meet next week to approve the names.

Zaineb Obeid and Abdul Razzaqal-Saiedy contributed reporting for this article.

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Paul Krugman

June 24, 2005
The War President
By PAUL KRUGMAN

VIENNA

In this former imperial capital, every square seems to contain a giant statue of a Habsburg on horseback, posing as a conquering hero.

America’s founders knew all too well how war appeals to the vanity of rulers and their thirst for glory. That’s why they took care to deny presidents the kingly privilege of making war at their own discretion.

But after 9/11 President Bush, with obvious relish, declared himself a “war president.” And he kept the nation focused on martial matters by morphing the pursuit of Al Qaeda into a war against Saddam Hussein.

In November 2002, Helen Thomas, the veteran White House correspondent, told an audience, “I have never covered a president who actually wanted to go to war” – but she made it clear that Mr. Bush was the exception. And she was right.

Leading the nation wrongfully into war strikes at the heart of democracy. It would have been an unprecedented abuse of power even if the war hadn’t turned into a military and moral quagmire. And we won’t be able to get out of that quagmire until we face up to the reality of how we got in.

Let me talk briefly about what we now know about the decision to invade Iraq, then focus on why it matters.

The administration has prevented any official inquiry into whether it hyped the case for war. But there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence that it did.

And then there’s the Downing Street Memo – actually the minutes of a prime minister’s meeting in July 2002 – in which the chief of British overseas intelligence briefed his colleagues about his recent trip to Washington.

“Bush wanted to remove Saddam,” says the memo, “through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

The U.S. news media largely ignored the memo for five weeks after it was released in The Times of London. Then some asserted that it was “old news” that Mr. Bush wanted war in the summer of 2002, and that W.M.D. were just an excuse. No, it isn’t. Media insiders may have suspected as much, but they didn’t inform their readers, viewers and listeners. And they have never held Mr. Bush accountable for his repeated declarations that he viewed war as a last resort.

Still, some of my colleagues insist that we should let bygones be bygones. The question, they say, is what we do now. But they’re wrong: it’s crucial that those responsible for the war be held to account.

Let me explain. The United States will soon have to start reducing force levels in Iraq, or risk seeing the volunteer Army collapse. Yet the administration and its supporters have effectively prevented any adult discussion of the need to get out.

On one side, the people who sold this war, unable to face up to the fact that their fantasies of a splendid little war have led to disaster, are still peddling illusions: the insurgency is in its “last throes,” says Dick Cheney. On the other, they still have moderates and even liberals intimidated: anyone who suggests that the United States will have to settle for something that falls far short of victory is accused of being unpatriotic.

We need to deprive these people of their ability to mislead and intimidate. And the best way to do that is to make it clear that the people who led us to war on false pretenses have no credibility, and no right to lecture the rest of us about patriotism.

The good news is that the public seems ready to hear that message – readier than the media are to deliver it. Major media organizations still act as if only a small, left-wing fringe believes that we were misled into war, but that “fringe” now comprises much if not most of the population.

In a Gallup poll taken in early April – that is, before the release of the Downing Street Memo – 50 percent of those polled agreed with the proposition that the administration “deliberately misled the American public” about Iraq’s W.M.D. In a new Rasmussen poll, 49 percent said that Mr. Bush was more responsible for the war than Saddam Hussein, versus 44 percent who blamed Saddam.

Once the media catch up with the public, we’ll be able to start talking seriously about how to get out of Iraq.

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

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June 24, 2005
The Outtakes of Brando’s Large Life
By CARYN JAMES

Hidden in one of the Japanese imitation-lacquer boxes that belonged to Marlon Brando and that will be auctioned at Christie’s next week are a few of his little treasures: a plastic bagel that, when lifted, reveals a big plastic cockroach; a fake finger, bloodied at one end; and other pint-size practical jokes. It’s not exactly a surprise that one of the greatest actors of our time was also a joker. We might have guessed that from some of his bizarre public appearances, like the television interview, from his bloated and nonsensical later years, in which he kissed Larry King on the mouth. And Johnny Depp, in a brief remembrance written for the Christie’s catalog, lovingly recalls his friend’s childlike sense of humor, with memories that are largely about whoopee cushions.

Still, it’s a jolt to see the evidence in the stuff he left behind. And much of what is for sale does seem like stuff, leftover odds and ends desirable only because Brando touched them. (The public can view the items, all 320 lots of them, beginning tomorrow at Christie’s. The auction is on Thursday.)

There is nothing exquisite, and certainly nothing that says “movie star,” about the furniture removed from Brando’s house on Mulholland Drive after he died last year at 80. It includes an ordinary brown leather couch and some weathered wooden garden chairs.

There are more intriguing personal objects that clearly meant something to him: conga drums, which he became passionate about playing when he was an unimaginably brilliant, intense and gorgeous young actor in the 1950′s; a small American Indian dreamcatcher that hung over his bed.

But the true riches in this sale are his papers, an invaluable cache of film scripts annotated with his comments, along with letters to him from Mario Puzo, Jack Kerouac and Francis Ford Coppola. The film-related material was not found in the house, but was stashed in storage buildings on the grounds, the way other people might toss an old bike in a garage. The papers were, after all, relics of his glory days.

The question that haunts Brando’s life is: What went wrong? Why did an actor of such genius throw his art away, twice? The first downslide began with his self-indulgence on the set of 1962′s “Mutiny on the Bounty”; and his 70′s comeback in “The Godfather” and “Last Tango in Paris” led to the second decline, into ballooning weight and junk roles taken only for money.

His possessions and even his papers don’t begin to explain that, but the objects on sale offer detailed evidence of both the artist and the guy who loved whoopee cushions. Two items have generated the most inquiries, Christie’s says: Brando’s annotated script for “The Godfather” and the Foosball table from his den.

Brando knew that celebrity tchotchkes don’t reveal much. “Fame has been the bane of my life, and I would have gladly given it up,” he wrote in his cockeyed but often illuminating memoir, “Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me.” Because of celebrity, he wrote, “People don’t relate to you as the person you are, but to a myth they believe you are, and the myth is always wrong.”

What is on display at Christie’s does not reveal the man behind the myth, but the elements that make up that myth, organized into neat little lots reflecting what we know (or think we know) about his taste and social causes. So here is the Brando who championed the rights of the American Indian: there’s a headdress, turquoise jewelry, a fringed coat and a vest, as well as a photograph of Brando wearing that vest. Here is the Brando with an affinity for Asia, evident in a collection of small statues, including two Buddhas, some kept in a shrine-like recess in a wall of his bedroom. There are shells and bits of coral from the Tahitian atoll he owned, and an aerial photograph of that island. These ordinary objects reinforce our kaleidoscopic image of the many Brandos. (There is a collection of eight kaleidoscopes for sale, too.)

Even the silliest film memorabilia are more eloquent because they could have belonged only to him. A leather belt inscribed “Mighty Moon Champion” in big bright colors was a gift from his co-stars on the set of “The Godfather,” where Brando, James Caan and Robert Duvall amused themselves by mooning one other.

Because his performance in “The Godfather” was so enduring and iconic, there is an almost talismanic aura about his working script for the film. Scribbled on the back page, with Brando’s frequent misspellings and typical crosshatches, is a list of notes about how to play Don Corleone and about his character’s sons Michael and Sonny:

# through the nose

# High voice

# Nose broken early in youth to account for difficulties

# Mihecl’s discision to kill

# Broken nose Sonny

Although he later sneered that he made films only for money, Brando’s notes about characters appear even on scripts for late, lesser movies like “The Score,” from 2001. For “Mutiny on the Bounty” there are such voluminous annotations on many versions of the script, and so many obsessive notes about the production (a notoriously troubled, overbudget shoot) that you can practically see him spinning out of control. (There are no scripts here from the 1950′s films that established him and inspired generations of actors, like “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “The Wild One” and “On the Waterfront.”)

Many of the letters he received are illuminating, too. There is the irresistibly understated, handwritten note from Puzo that begins, “I wrote a book called THE GODFATHER,” and goes on, “I think you’re the only actor who can play the Godfather with that quiet force and irony the part requires.” The note was sent even before Mr. Coppola made the famous screen test in which Brando stuffed toilet paper in his cheeks to transform himself.

In a long typewritten letter, Kerouac asks Brando to “buy ON THE ROAD and make a movie of it.” He adds, “you play Dean and I’ll play Sal.” Too bad that potentially hilarious buddy movie was never made.

And there is a letter from Mr. Coppola about “Apocalypse Now” (which made the troubled “Mutiny” seem like a breeze), in which he struggles to make sense of Brando’s character, Kurtz, then called Leighley.

These papers are much more than Hollywood trinkets, and they belong in a library or archive where they would be available to film historians and biographers. But all the film material Brando left behind will be auctioned. Through a spokesman, the estate’s executors said that “within the will, there was no provision for any charitable donation,” meaning they couldn’t have donated anything if they had wanted to. Brando didn’t specify what should be done with his papers, either, apparently content to let the myth go where it would.

Christie’s estimate for the sale is modestly given as “in excess of $1 million.” But celebrity auctions routinely surpass the estimates, which don’t account for the passion some fans can bring to anything in a movie star’s orbit. Christie’s is guessing that someone will pay $4,000 to $6,000 for the black tunic that Brando wore as Jor-El in “Superman,” $300 to $500 for two of his driver’s licenses from the 1990′s, $600 to $800 for (no kidding) an exercise machine. For Brando, so cynical about his fame, getting the public to buy his old stuff might be his final practical joke.

The Personal Property of Marlon Brando auction will begin at noon on Thursday at Christie’s, 20 Rockefeller Plaza, Manhattan, where the 320 lots of stage, screen and personal objects can be viewed starting tomorrow and continuing through Wednesday. Information: (212) 636-2000.

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MSNBC.com
‘I’m passionate about life’
Actor Tom Cruise talks with ‘Today’ host Matt Lauer about his new love, new movie and his recent controversial comments

Today show
Updated: 10:45 a.m. ET June 24, 2005


The past few weeks have been full of excitement for Tom Cruise. “Today” host Matt Lauer sat down with the actor and talked about his new love, his new movie, “War of the Worlds,” and the recent firestorm he caused when he commented on Brooke Shield’s use of therapy and drugs to cure her postpartum depression.

Matt Lauer: Anything at all interesting happening in your life these days?

Tom Cruise: Well, you know, same old, same old.

Lauer: Same old you know what?

Cruise: Same old you know what.

Lauer: How are you handling this? I mean every magazine, every newspaper, and every entertainment show. What’s it like for you to be living through this right now?

Cruise: I have to tell you. It’s just a great time in my life. I’m really happy. And, you know, I’m engaged. I’m going to be married. I can’t restrain myself. It’s like you’ve got two little cords on your mouth and you can’t stop smiling.

Lauer: I was thinking about it. On the one hand, it’s got to be a little hard to see yourself everywhere, splashed across the pages. Another aspect of this, though, is, how many actors 20-something years into a career can generate this kind of interest still?

Cruise: You know, I just do what I do. I love making movies. And I feel privileged to be able to do that, always. And it’s something that — I’m just living my life, you know.

Lauer: We talk about life in a second. Let’s talk about the movie, though. Okay, “War of the Worlds.” I mean, I’ve always been fascinated by this whole concept, the “we are not alone in a big way,” concept. Do you remember your first exposure to it, to the story?

Cruise: I remember, I was a kid. And I heard about the Orson Wells radio play. It was my first exposure to this story.

Lauer: This is not just an alien movie. The story breaks down on a lot of different levels. And on one of the levels, your character is a father?

Cruise: Mm-hmm.

Lauer: Not the best father in the world.

Cruise: Mm-hmm.

Lauer: Tell me how that plays into this whole scenario.

Cruise: When we were working on this story three years ago, [director] Steven [Spielberg] and I came up with this idea of making it about a family. And so now, he is forced in these circumstances to rise to the occasion. Will he rise to the occasion? And I just think it’s very human. I think the — you know, you’re a father.

Lauer: Sure.

Cruise: I’m a father, you know. I always wanted to be a father. Remember when you first held your child? It’s like wow, tremendous sense of responsibility.

Lauer: Life-changing.

Cruise: Yeah. And we talk about it. But not until you experience it can you really know it. We wanted to imbue the story with that journey.

Lauer: Is this a scary movie in the traditional sense of Hollywood scary?

Cruise: I think it’s Spielbergian scary.

Lauer: Is that a word?

Cruise: It now is. I think, you know, I tease him. ‘Cause I say, I know your movies better than [I know] you. You know, I studied his edits so many times. I’ve studied his movies. And having worked with him, it’s not analytical. He’s just creating. And he has tremendous power because he understands the medium. And he’s just that great, great, great storyteller. I think he’s the greatest storyteller cinema has ever known.

Lauer: Let’s talk about selling this movie. You’ve just toured around the world, getting the story of “War of the Worlds” out there. And at the same time, you’ve got this great thing happening in your personal life that has become the subject of so many headlines and stories.

Cruise: Really?

Lauer: Yeah. From what I’ve seen. You want to count? Three thousand, four hundred and four.

Cruise: Are you serious?

Lauer: No. Made that up. Is there any fear in your part that what happens personally overshadows the movie?

Cruise: Nah, it never does.

Lauer: Has it helped the movie?

Cruise: I don’t know. You know what? It comes down to the movie. It always comes down to the movie.

Lauer: You are being so much more open. You’ve been on this show in the past at times where you were in other relationships. And I’d kind of broach the subject of a personal life. And you would very gingerly steer it away. That was how we came to know Tom Cruise. And now, you’re saying, “You know what? I’m okay with it.” So, it does seem like a different guy.

Cruise: Yeah. But they’re still writing it. You got to understand. All that stuff, they’d still write it. They’d still talk about it. And the thing is, I still feel I will talk about what I feel, what I want to talk about.

Lauer: Right.

Cruise: And I won’t talk about what I don’t want to talk about. And it just doesn’t matter. It comes down to the movie, you know. And I also feel, Matt, I’m living my life. And I feel fortunate, you know. I feel really fortunate. And I’m excited.


Lauer: You just said something that made me think about something. And if you get out there and talk about it, it kind of takes away a lot of their power to make stuff up. Doesn’t it? Because you’re telling the real story. Where does it leave them to go?

Cruise: Yeah. But here’s the point. I don’t even get into that game. I’m just living my life, Matt. It’s something that — I mean, I’m living my life. And I’m doing the best that I can, and doing it in a way that I feel is right. I like hearing good news, you know. I like hearing, you know, if something good happens to you, it’s nice. I like sitting here talking to you.

Lauer: If you like hearing it, you must want to share it, too.

Cruise: Yeah.

Lauer: So, when you hear the cynics, Mr. Cruise, and you’ve heard ‘em, who say, “This is publicity for a movie, this relationship,” or “This is Tom Cruise in his 40s trying to become or stay relevant for a younger audience, and that’s why he’s out there talking about this relationship with this lovely young lady,” who happens to be sitting right over there. How do you respond to that?

Cruise: You know what? There’s always cynics. There always has been. There always will be.

Lauer: You laugh about it, or does it just bug you?

Cruise: No. I have never worried, Matt, about what other people think and what other people say.

Lauer: Katie, close your ears for a second, okay? You have said that Katie is the real thing. She is sensational, she is magnificent. Can you explain to me what she’s brought to your life that hasn’t been brought to your life in the past?

Cruise: I don’t want to compare things. I just say—

Lauer: I know—

Cruise: No, no, no. Because, you know, it — but what it is, it’s that thing where you just — in life, when it just happens, Matt. You know? It just — you meet someone. And it’s — I can’t even describe it.

Lauer: Katie has mentioned that she is embracing, or at least exposing herself and opening herself up to, Scientology. At this stage in your life, could you be with someone who doesn’t have an interest?

Cruise: You know, Scientology is something that you don’t understand. It’s like, you could be a Christian and be a Scientologist, okay. Scientology is something—

Lauer: So, it doesn’t replace religion.

Cruise: It is a religion. Because it’s dealing with the spirit. You as a spiritual being. It gives you tools you can use to apply to your life.

We asked Cruise to explain his recent comments regarding Brooke Shields. Cruise created a firestorm when he criticized Shields for revealing that she went into therapy and took antidepressants to deal with her postpartum depression. Cruise has said that, as a Scientologist, he doesn’t believe in psychiatric medicine.

Cruise: I’ve never agreed with psychiatry, ever. Before I was a Scientologist I never agreed with psychiatry. And when I started studying the history of psychiatry, I understood more and more why I didn’t believe in psychology.

And as far as the Brooke Shields thing, look, you got to understand, I really care about Brooke Shields. I think, here’s a wonderful and talented woman. And I want to see her do well. And I know that psychiatry is a pseudo science.

Lauer: But Tom, if she said that this particular thing helped her feel better, whether it was the antidepressants or going to a counselor or psychiatrist, isn’t that enough?

Cruise: Matt, you have to understand this. Here we are today, where I talk out against drugs and psychiatric abuses of electric shocking people, okay, against their will, of drugging children with them not knowing the effects of these drugs. Do you know what Aderol is? Do you know Ritalin? Do you know now that Ritalin is a street drug? Do you understand that?

Lauer: The difference is —

Cruise: No, no, Matt.

Lauer: This wasn’t against her will, though.

Cruise: Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt —

Lauer: But this wasn’t against her will.

Cruise: Matt, I’m asking you a question.

Lauer: I understand there’s abuse of all of these things.

Cruise: No, you see. Here’s the problem. You don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do.

Lauer: Aren’t there examples, and might not Brooke Shields be an example, of someone who benefited from one of those drugs?

Cruise: All it does is mask the problem, Matt. And if you understand the history of it, it masks the problem. That’s what it does. That’s all it does. You’re not getting to the reason why. There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance.

Lauer: So, postpartum depression to you is kind of a little psychological gobbledygook —

Cruise: No. I did not say that.

Lauer: I’m just asking what you, what would you call it?

Cruise: No. No. Abso— Matt, now you’re talking about two different things.

Lauer: But that’s what she went on the antidepressant for.

Cruise: But what happens, the antidepressant, all it does is mask the problem. There’s ways, [with] vitamins and through exercise and various things… I’m not saying that that isn’t real. That’s not what I’m saying. That’s an alteration of what I’m saying. I’m saying that drugs aren’t the answer, these drugs are very dangerous. They’re mind-altering, antipsychotic drugs. And there are ways of doing it without that so that we don’t end up in a brave new world. The thing that I’m saying about Brooke is that there’s misinformation, okay. And she doesn’t understand the history of psychiatry. She doesn’t understand in the same way that you don’t understand it, Matt.


Lauer: But a little bit of what you’re saying Tom is, you say you want people to do well. But you want them do to well by taking the road that you approve of, as opposed to a road that may work for them.

Cruise: No, no, I’m not.

Lauer: Well, if antidepressants work for Brooke Shields, why isn’t that okay?

Cruise: I disagree with it. And I think that there’s a higher and better quality of life. And I think that, promoting — for me personally, see, you’re saying what, I can’t discuss what I wanna discuss?

Lauer: No. You absolutely can.

Cruise: I know. But Matt, you’re going in and saying that, that I can’t discuss this.

Lauer: I’m only asking, isn’t there a possibility that — do you examine the possibility that these things do work for some people? That yes, there are abuses. And yes, maybe they’ve gone too far in certain areas. Maybe there are too many kids on Ritalin. Maybe electric shock —

Cruise: Too many kids on Ritalin? Matt.

Lauer: I’m just saying. But aren’t there examples where it works?

Cruise: Matt. Matt, Matt, you don’t even — you’re glib. You don’t even know what Ritalin is. If you start talking about chemical imbalance, you have to evaluate and read the research papers on how they came up with these theories, Matt, okay? That’s what I’ve done. Then you go and you say where’s the medical test? Where’s the blood test that says how much Ritalin you’re supposed to get?

Lauer: It’s very impressive to listen to you. Because clearly, you’ve done the homework. And you know the subject.

Cruise: And you should. And you should do that also. Because just knowing people who are on Ritalin isn’t enough. You should be a little bit more responsible in knowing really —

Lauer: I’m not prescribing Ritalin, Tom. And I’m not asking anyone else to do it. I’m simply saying, I know some people who seem to have been helped by it.

Cruise: But you’re saying this is a very important issue.

Lauer: I couldn’t agree more.

Cruise: It’s very — and you know what? You’re here on the “Today” show.

Lauer: Right.

Cruise: And to talk about it in a way of saying, “Well, isn’t it okay,” and being reasonable about it when you don’t know and I do, I think that you should be a little bit more responsible in knowing what it is.

Lauer: But —

Cruise: Because you communicate to people.

Lauer: But you’re now telling me that your experiences with the people I know, which are zero, are more important than my experiences.

Cruise: What do you mean by that?

Lauer: You’re telling me what’s worked for people I know or hasn’t worked for people I know. I’m telling you, I’ve lived with these people and they’re better.

Cruise: So, you’re advocating it.

Lauer: I am not. I’m telling you in their case, in their individual case, it worked. I am not gonna go out and say, “Get your kids on Ritalin. It’s the cure-all and the end-all.”

Cruise: Matt, but here’s the point. What is the ideal scene for life? Okay. The ideal scene is someone not having to take antipsychotic drugs.

Lauer: I would agree.

Cruise: Okay. So, now you look at a departure from that ideal scene, is someone taking drugs, okay. And then you go, okay. What is the theory and the science behind that, that justifies that?

Lauer: Let me take this more general, because I think you and I can go around in circles on this for awhile. And I respect your opinion. Do you want more people to understand Scientology? Would that be a goal of yours?

Cruise: You know what? Absolutely. Of course, you know.

Lauer: How do you go about that?

Cruise: You just communicate about it. And the important thing is, like you and I talk about it, whether it’s okay, if I want to know something, I go and find out. Because I don’t talk about things that I don’t understand. I’ll say, you know what? I’m not so sure about that. I’ll go find more information about it so I can come to an opinion based on the information that I have.

Lauer: You’re so passionate about it.

Cruise: I’m passionate about learning. I’m passionate about life, Matt.

© 2005 MSNBC Interactive
© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8343367

Aspen’s Journal

• The Life

• Aspen’s Journal


Monday, January 10, 2005

My name is Aspen, and I am going to work at the world famous Chicken Ranch Brothel in Pahrump, Nevada, which is as close as legally possible to Las Vegas. Most people think that prostitution is legal in Las Vegas, but it is not. Yes, they do have outcall services where the girls more often than not do engage in prostitution. The outcall services do not ever mention sex for money; what they offer is an hour strip tease/massage for a flat fee. Anything else is negotiated with the call girl after the flat fee is paid. Therefore, solicitation of sex for money is illegal—the brothels are not in Clark County but in Nye County where prostitution is legal.


Photo by Benjamen Purvis

I knew that there were brothels located close to Las Vegas when my boyfriend and I first moved out here, but I really had no idea what they were like and surely never pictured myself coming to work for one. I was asked several times if this was something I would ever do, but my only answer was that I’d never really thought about it. Unlike Eden, who had danced for many years, I had never danced. So I visited Eden in the bar of the Chicken Ranch, and she took me back for a tour. I met Diamond that night as well.

I began contemplating the idea of working at a brothel, selling myself. Why? Easy money. Furniture money. I debated quite a bit with my boyfriend until I finally decided that he was OK with it and that I was really OK with it. So after a long four days of the Adult Entertainment Expo, Eden and I headed for Pahrump. I feel very fortunate to have her to help me. She has schooled me on everything and even helped me shop. She said that I was coming in with an even bigger advantage than she was because she was just dropped off her first time.


Wednesday, January 12, 2005

First lineup was at about 1:30. Three guys—one was a taxi driver who came in first, and one of the three girls picked was Eden. Wow —at least I’ve had my first lineup and the butterflies are starting to go away … A little before 4 p.m., we had the second lineup of the day. It was a cute, young guy. Eden was busy, so she didn’t get to see it —I was picked!! Yea! His name was Michael, and he knew what he wanted—blowjob. Diamond came and did the Dick Check, I got the money, he cleaned up, and away we went. This was my first blowjob ever with a condom, and it wasn’t all that bad. Afterwards, we laid there for a bit after he cleaned up, talking about his friend he left in Vegas playing poker. He agrees with me that Texas Hold-’Em is boring. I encouraged him to come back before he leaves on Sunday to see me and to bring his friend, who happens to be a virgin. He left happy and gave me a nice tip to prove it. The whole thing took about 40 minutes—not bad for a blowjob.

Las Vegas Weekly. All Rights Reserved

The Life

Inside the brothel, days and nights are an unusual mix of strict rules, camaraderie, and sex for money. Richard Abowitz gets to know the women of the Chicken Ranch.
By Richard Abowitz


• The Life

• Aspen’s Journal

It is 5 p.m. on Friday when I arrive at what looks like a typical small-town saloon—a television is turned to sports and two guys are having drinks at the bar. But there are also about a half-dozen girls spread around the room. Two are playing a game of pool. A thin girl with blond hair arches her back just so, less, it seems, to make the shot than to display her—is the correct word G-string or thong? (I could be wrong; she sinks the ball in smoking style.) A thought passes through my head, and it’s the first time I have ever surveyed a room with this kind of confidence, the sort that rock stars have: I can have sex with any girl in this room any time I want. It’s an unbelievable high.

Five minutes later, Debbie Rivenburgh, 48, the general manger of the Chicken Ranch, gives me a tour. Debbie, for all purposes, is the boss of the Chicken Ranch, responsible for all the prostitutes, maintenance, security, staff and shift mangers. Everyone answers to her.

Despite the building’s campy front façade and porch, the comfy bar and the plush, spacious parlor where the lineups take place, I am surprised to discover that within its depth the Chicken Ranch is a maze made up of five double-wide trailers interconnected by wooden passageways and other rooms added on in what seems an architecturally haphazard fashion. The walls are decorated with glamour- shot photographs of working girls, some of which seem to date from decades ago. Another hallway has a series of framed Marilyn Monroe photos. There are also some watercolors, faded perhaps from years of hanging around low ceilings and hallways that can be thick with cigarette smoke. There is huge a kitchen with three large tables, a gym, more bedrooms for girls to work than I can count jutting off in all directions, a shift manger’s office, and a larger office for Debbie in the back. Behind the brothel is a pool surrounded by bungalows and a fenced back yard.

“You are about to make history,” Debbie tells me as she rounds up sheets and pillowcases for me. She doesn’t say this with any pleasure. She has been employed here for 18 years and never before has a reporter been allowed to move into a working girl’s room for a few days to live unmonitored by her. In fact, it is her day off and she is only here to orient me before returning to her residence, which is another double-wide, placed further behind the brothel.

Over the years this has occasionally made for a thin line between her life and work. “It is a complicated business to run and it consumes your life. My personal life has suffered. I’ve missed events when kids were growing up because my job had to come first.” It’s a balance she’s better at now. She just completed months of taking care of her grandkids while her daughter served in Iraq. (She’s instituted a discount at the brothel for veterans as well as those currently serving.)

She doesn’t think she’s unusual. “The people who work here could be your next-door neighbor, because we are. All of the staff that work here are Pahrump locals that are raising families. We are just normal people.”

Debbie was never a prostitute—”I took this job working part-time as a shift manager as well as two other part-time jobs. I was a change girl at Saddle West, and I did dishes in a restaurant. That’s how desperate I was for work … After six months here it turned to full-time and now it’s been 18 years and I still look forward to every day I come to work. Not many people can say that about their job.”

Even in our phone conversations leading to my trip—which was arranged so the dates didn’t conflict with her family obligations and took place after her daughter’s safe return from Iraq—Debbie made clear that to her core she’s a strong traditionalist when it comes to the brothel industry:

“The man who owned the Chicken Ranch started here in 1982 and he learned the business from the working girls who were here at that time who taught him the business. He taught me the business.”

The Chicken Ranch is perhaps the most famous brothel name in the United States. The original Chicken Ranch has a history that goes back to the 19th century in Texas (serving soldiers from the Civil War through WWII, cowboys, and eventually the workers drawn in by the Texas oil boom). Though prostitution was always illegal in Texas, it wasn’t until 1973 that the authorities moved to close the brothel. They succeeded in shutting down the Texas establishment, but the story memorialized in the movie Best Little Whorehouse in Texas made the Chicken Ranch name legendary, and a brothel owner in Nye County acquired the rights to that name for a legal brothel. Though Debbie isn’t sure, she thinks some of the older paintings on the wall may be from the original Chicken Ranch in Texas. The current owner, Kenneth Green, purchased The Chicken Ranch in 1982. Next to Debbie’s desk hangs a framed photo of the front of the Chicken Ranch back then: The road leading to the brothel is still dirt, there is no front porch. Green clearly knew it wasn’t much to look at. Underneath the frame is a plaque inscribed: “Would You Pay $1.25 Million for this?” (Currently the brothel is for sale and though there is no sign out front, the prices bandied about are in the $6.1 million-to-$7 million range, though the publicist for the Chicken Ranch told me that the worth of the place has been estimated at $10 million.)

“Things have evolved over the years since then to a point,” Debbie says. “But I am a creature of habit. When I’m told to do something a certain way I do it that way and I don’t change the way I do it. I was taught in 1987 that this is what you say, this is how you do a lineup and I still do it that way.”

And that’s why although radio, television and the Atlantic Monthly have all passed through the Chicken Ranch of late, Debbie still focuses on the significance of my staying in a room that would usually house a working girl as “making history,” and making history in general is not something of which Debbie is inclined to approve, particularly when it involves the press. “We have been burned again and again by the press.”

Mostly, Debbie’s view of press falls more on the side of public service rather than with a mind toward promoting the Chicken Ranch. For example, she frequently does interviews by e-mail with college students doing research papers. She tells me that the man who ran the place before her had the same policy.

But it isn’t just press. Debbie will never be excited about doing anything new at the Chicken Ranch. Take the issue of cell phones. Until quite recently they were not welcome at the Chicken Ranch. “I did not trust all of the working women to not answer their phones if they had clients in the room. And that would have been a nightmare, just a nightmare. So we didn’t let the working girls have cell phones while they were here.”

So even years after cells became acceptable at other brothels, the Chicken Ranch still held out. “We had two pay phones, and one was an old phone booth so the girls could have privacy.” But according to Debbie, the working girls’ constant complaining eventually reached a fever pitch. “They said they needed their phones to keep in touch with their families and check up on their children and all these different reasons.”

Debbie was at last convinced. After much thought and discussion (about 18 months ago), a perfect solution was reached. In the shift manger’s office, Debbie points to a series of little wooden cubbyholes against the far wall of the office. Each wooden box has a room number.

“We decided that we would let them keep cell phones. But when they book a client they have to check the cell phone. And they can pick up the phone when they are through with the party. It works, and we don’t have to worry about the more immature girls wanting to answer their phones and talk to their husbands and boyfriends while there are customers around. It’s working and I’m amazed.”

Even when it comes to something as potentially profitable as setting up the website for the Chicken Ranch, the brothel was slow in coming to a decision. Debbie recalls:

“I know when the Internet started to be a big thing and people all started to get it in their homes, me and the man who taught me the business were reluctant to engage in having a website. We were old- school, and we held back because we didn’t want to venture into that area because it was something we didn’t know, and we were afraid of it. I know some of the other brothels and we were hearing that it was helping increase their business because guys could research. So we reluctantly gave in and got a website. I have noticed a vast change in business.”

It was more than Debbie’s temperament that accounted for the reticence, however. The brothels in Nevada are the only legal ones in the United States, and they exist because of the Silver State’s unique history and quirky traditions. The truth is, all they have is that past; there is no guarantee of a future. Debbie fully realizes this. “Is it ever going to be legalized anywhere else? Probably not. Most people can’t see past ‘prostitution’; it’s such a bad word.” And therefore, time is likely not on the side of the Nevada brothels and particularly those near Pahrump.

When Debbie arrived in Pahrump in 1987, the population was about 3,000. It’s now a town of over 30,000. The week after I left the Chicken Ranch—in what the Review-Journal reported to be one of the largest crowds ever to show up at a Pahrump Town Board meeting—a motion to lift a ban against brothels within Pahrump city limits to allow the annexation of the tiny bit of Nye County that includes The Chicken Ranch and neighboring Sheri’s Ranch, was rejected. The town board member who sponsored the brothel amendment is quoted in the paper as estimating that this would’ve meant about $13 million over the next decade for cash-starved Pahrump; probably more tax revenue than any other business in the town. Though the bill would have created no new brothels and there was a common-sense financial benefit to making this annexation, Pahrump’s citizens didn’t want to have as part of their city the same brothels that were already a long-standing part of their community.

It’s not an isolated case.

The Nevada Legislature just approved a massive new entertainment tax on topless strip clubs and, despite the brothel industry’s lobbying efforts, the legal prostitution houses were exempted from the tax. On June 10, the R-J’s John G. Edwards, reporting on the bill, noted, “Legal brothels, which operate in places such as Pahrump, will continue to avoid the entertainment tax even though a brothel-industry representative asked that brothels be included.” In the history of the United State has there ever been another industry that has lobbied to pay more taxes? And that’s the rub—the nation’s only legal brothels exist always a vote away from extinction, with only a long tradition to protect them in a fast-growing community like Pahrump, with increasingly fewer people connected to local history. It can’t be a good thing when politicians are scared to tax you.

I ask Debbie if she feels the days of legal brothels in Nye Country are numbered.

“I think they will stay legal into the future, but how far into the future I don’t know. As this town grows and you have your younger families raising children moving to town, you’re hearing more and more opposition to us being here. But we stay down here where we’re at, we don’t abuse the emergency services in town—I have been here 18 years and I’ve never once had to call the sheriff’s department to assist us. We like to be a good neighbor to the people who live down in this area. As long as we continue to stay down here, be good to the town and don’t bother anybody, then we’ll be OK.”

So while the brothels near Reno—where the population boom is far less extreme and threatening to the legality of the brothels—have been active in courting publicity, porn-star appearances and, these days, even presenting the occasional reality television fodder for cable, things have stayed far more traditional in Southern Nevada. And that’s especially true at the Chicken Ranch.


• • •

This desire to stay on the lowdown is also perhaps a significant factor in what everyone agrees is the most onerous practice of brothels in Nevada, the lockdown. Lockdown is custom, not law, and it is practiced primarily by Southern Nevada brothels including the Chicken Ranch and neighboring Sheri’s Ranch.

During the periods the women work—which can last for months at a time (the minimum stay at the Chicken Ranch is 10 days with girls always spending the first few days unable to work until STD test results arrive from a clinic in Las Vegas)—prostitutes are not allowed beyond the gates that enclose the brothel. Debbie admits that lockdown is hard on the girls:

“People tend to lose sight—and even I tend to lose sight—in the day-to-day grind, that they have lives outside of here. To completely leave your life and go be locked up in a place for a couple weeks at a time, well, your personal life doesn’t come to a standstill.”

The girls are more blunt in referring to life under lockdown as “pussy prison.”

The only exception to lockdown is on Tuesday, dubbed “Doctor Day,” where the girls are allowed into Pahrump on their own for no more than four hours—divided into morning and afternoon shifts so there are always women available for customers back at the brothel, which is open 24/7. But even on this day there are limits. First off, at least an hour of that precious time away from the Chicken Ranch is spent at the doctor’s office getting more STD tests.

Unofficially, the girls are discouraged from going to casinos, hotels and any other high-profile place or places they could conceivably ply their trade outside of the legal confines of the brothel. They are also asked to dress modestly and behave appropriately.

In fact, the brothel management, according to a few working girls, is so nervous about the weekly outings to Pahrump that according to one girl, “That pretty much just leaves Wal-Mart, the grocery store, the gas station and fast food as the places we can go.” On the Doctor Day I am there, despite having spent a week straight bottled up in the brothel, all of the girls who went out that Tuesday morning returned more than an hour before curfew. There just isn’t much they can do in Pahrump.

The tour ends in front of my home for the next few days. Room 7 is a Spartan affair with a bureau, a mattress hoisted up on four cinder blocks next to a small nightstand, the lower drawer of which—where the Gideon Bible would be in a hotel—is filled with medical waste bags to dispose of condoms. The carpet has that meaningless gray-tan color that would be immediately recognizable to apartment renters in Las Vegas. There is a television with a reading lamp placed next to it. I figure they are being thoughtful, knowing that as a writer I will be making use of the lamp. I put it on the nightstand and adjust it to reflect on my notebook, thinking it pretty convenient. It is only the next morning that I learn the lamp’s actual purpose: the girls use it to perform dick checks on customers to make sure they have no visible signs of an STD.

I share a bathroom across the hall with T. and any of T.’s customers who want to use it. She’s a tall blond in her late 30s who is completing the testing for a regular job in the medical field and wishes to be identified only as T. There are nicer rooms with faux-wood floors, and one I saw even had a private bathroom. But those are for the girls who are regulars. My room is meant for the more transient girls. And while there is certainly a lot of turnover in a business like this one, there are also some surprisingly long-term working girls employed at the Chicken Ranch. One tall blond who can’t yet be 30 has been living here more or less since 1997, and every morning she walks the brothel’s dog, Heidi, and pays for and feeds the brothel cat, Meow Meow.

After showing me to my room, the first thing Debbie does is call a mandatory meeting to introduce me to the working girls and staff and to make sure everyone is aware that I will be around reporting a story. They have just finished dinner—meals are served at noon and 5 p.m. and so the gathering takes place in the kitchen. A few days earlier, Debbie told me over the phone about the considerable effort and time on her part it took to prepare the girls for my arrival. She said it wasn’t easy. The girls were used to the routine under lockdown and having anyone—but especially a man—stay over at the house was very troubling to some of them. So Debbie’s regulations seemed compiled more to meet the concerns she heard from those girls along the way than to protect the brothel from my snooping. She gives us all a handout labeled “Richard” with a dozen rules. Typical among them:

“Do not listen to or include in your article any private conversations between working girls.”

“Do not enter the working girls’ bedrooms unless you are invited by one of the interview participants.”

“Above all, respect the privacy of the women who are not participating with you.”

Even the girls who had appeared to be party animals (who I am introduced to as Trinity and Diamond) in the bar just a few moments before are now fully focused employees paying close and sober attention. It turns out, there were no fast times going on in the bar, anyway, at least not when I got here. The scene I had witnessed in the bar when I arrived at the Chicken Ranch was nothing more than a “barlor,” a display of the wares meant for the two men who had been sitting watching the television. (“Barlor” comes from “bar” and “parlor”.)

When the customers request a barlor, the working girls must all file into the bar and introduce themselves, and after that comes the awkward period when the men must make some decisions for things to go forward. The decision of which, if any, girl to choose is one I soon learn guys love to agonize over and put off making. During the next few days I will see countless barlors and they tend to all end up like a bad high-school dance: boys on one side of the room, girls on the other. After introductions, the men tend to talk among themselves and the girls must wait to be asked back to their room, and so amuse themselves by playing pool or sitting together chatting. Some girls resent this waste of time since so many men arrive simply as gawkers.


Photo by Benjamen Purvis

“I don’t really like barlors,” Eden tells me. “Unless there is a barlor, most of us who don’t really drink much never go in there.” (Eden has great hair and a lovely face and no illusions about her number-one selling point, her chest: i.e., her website address, Eden38dd.com). Eden explains that she tends to prefer the more traditional lineup that, while somewhat more demeaning, involves less socializing and works better for keeping the customers from procrastinating. Actually, it isn’t too long after Eden and I start talking that I get to go see for myself, as the bell rings to signal to all the girls in the house that a customer has arrived for a lineup.

There is nothing more ritualized and traditional at the Chicken Ranch than the lineup. The customer or customers sit on thick, comfortable sofas while the girls all crowd in the hallway adjacent to the parlor, around the corner, passing back intelligence reports on the age, nationality and whatever other details of the men become available from sneaked glimpses.

“Ladies you have a visitor,” the shift manger says. And, with that, the girls file out and stand single file in a row in front of the sofas. A curtain covering the back wall parts, revealing a mirror behind the girls that allows customers a rear view. Each girl introduces herself, but is not allowed to say anything else. As in the barlors, customers tend to not want to make up their mind, and that can be agonizing for the girls who must stand half- naked (and, if it is late enough, half asleep, too) fully displayed. The girls try to hide their discomfort and smile and project a sensual attitude, but it is hard for them not to inwardly groan when, as usually happens, the customers will stall for time with something like, “Wow, they are all so lovely. Can I have all of them?” Mostly, the girls are good-natured enough to laugh as if amused by this line they hear every day. If the men take too long, it is up to the shift manager to nudge things along with “Are you ready to go back with one of the girls now?” or “I really can’t have them just keep standing out here like this. Is there someone who you would like to spend time with?”

After being picked—either by lineup or barlor—the girl then takes the customer back to her room to negotiate money. Though the menu of available services itself is posted on the website ( www.chickenranchbrothel.com), it is without prices since the working girls are independent contractors and they fix their own rates. One of the few truly sensitive areas to both the brothel and the working girls is the discussion—to be blunt—of how much specific sex acts cost. The truth is, even for the girl the amount can vary. A customer can strike a better deal during a slow time than during one that is busy. The problem is that it’s almost impossible for a customer to know which times are busy and when things are slow.

On Saturday night I ask the shift manager when the rush begins. “Who knows?” she says. “This isn’t a nightclub.” And that’s true. Saturday night turned out to be far quieter than Saturday afternoon, when the bell rang over a dozen times before noon. Monday evening seemed busier than Saturday night. Who would’ve guessed?

Diamond, Trinity and T. call themselves the three musketeers. All sexy and ready do business on Saturday night, instead they sit crashed out together on the couch watching three movies in a row on the Lifetime channel. According to Trinity: “We also watch Jerry Springer and every day at 2 there is our soap opera, Passions.” I could be wrong, but based on their dedication, my guess is there will be no discounting from these girls when Passions is on.

Over my time there I am stunned at how cheap guys can be. Especially, since—and, of course, there is no way for customers to know this—behind the scenes every little difference means more than you think to the working girls. I am sure it has to do with the deeply personal nature of what they are selling. But there are probably no other workers whose income can easily enter the six figures annually whose personal happiness is so much increased by performing an act for $600 instead of $500. The girls don’t use the word “date,” preferring “party,” and if you kick in the extra hundred it really does make the girl feel more like she is at a party.

Interestingly, no girl would admit to performing the act differently or more enthusiastically on account of money. The sex a girl provides for $800 would be little different than the sex for $400 (if you can get her to agree to it). In short: halfhearted sex is not for sale at a discount. During my time at the Chicken Ranch the range was extraordinary, with deals cut that ranged from $200 to $3,000 (for a bungalow). All of this money is split 50/50 with the brothel. The girls must also pay $30 room and board to the brothel as well as pay for their own medical testing (about $60 a week) and even provide their own condoms. So in general, the girls who make the most money are doing it through volume rather than a few high rollers. According to Eden, “I don’t have notches in my bedpost, because at this point my bedpost would be shredded to a toothpick.”

Still, making the girls’ happy isn’t the only reason to err on the side of bringing too much money to the Chicken Ranch if you go, because not having enough can mean a long, wasted trip from Vegas. Amazingly it happens all the time. On Saturday morning at 7 a.m. a man paid $150 to arrive by taxi from Vegas, only to not have enough money left for what he came here for.

By my estimate about half of the men who actually go back with a girl wind up leaving because they are unwilling to reach an agreement. Often though, the deal-breaker isn’t money but the customer wanting an activity that is either banned by law (oral sex without a condom, for example) or something that the girls refuse to do, according to Eden: “For most girls it’s: no kissing on the mouth, no fingering, and don’t bite me.”

Still, according to Eden, customers tend to be respectful. Eden says of the typical customer: “I would say generally it is 35- to 65-year-old professional men. It is a demographic of people with the disposable income and that generally is pretty nice guys.”

A marketing major a few credits shy of graduation, Eden explains her approach to prostitution as a mix of entrepreneurship and post-post-post (hell, this kind hasn’t even started yet) feminism. “I go about it as a business. I am a smart girl and I am an attractive girl so I know I can do many, many different things. But this is fulfilling an aspect of my sexual life. Most people don’t embrace their sexuality for all it’s worth. If you are a sexual person, you enjoy all the aspects of sex, the different things. Just because it is not mainstream doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Sex is such a crazy thing. Whatever is enjoyable sexually is in the mind and body and spirit no matter what it may be. And I am just a very sexual person and I am making a business out of it. Would I be doing this for free? No!”

Eden, of course, realizes she is an exception and this job is not always the career of first choice. “Lots of girls that do this line of work aren’t good for anything else. I don’t know how to say it without being politically incorrect, but this is all they can do. They are out here because they have no home, no place else to go. They have nothing. This is all they are good for. That seems very sad. But I also think they have the potential (because of the amount of money they earn) to do so much more with themselves but they opt not to do it. They are doing what they want to do with it and so I don’t criticize them.”

In a society where being a model for Playboy has become a status symbol of the highest order, most of the adult entertainment jobs that used to be a lifetime stain are now acceptable (two weeks ago a former stripper was elected to a judgeship). Also, to a large extent, strippers and even porn stars are now glorified by the mainstream media. But prostitutes are the day laborers of the sex business. The cultural status of a prostitute is as loathsome now as it was 20 years ago and the workers at the Chicken Ranch feel it acutely. And for all her independence, her pride in her ability to earn money and to manage her career and, most of all, to be exactly who she wants to be, even with all of that, Eden feels the sting of society’s disapproval:

“In general with everything else I don’t care what you think. I don’t care what you think about what I look like; I don’t care what you think about the way I dress; I don’t care what you think about my car; I don’t care what you think about me in any way, shape or form whatsoever. But yet when it comes down to this I don’t tell people. Instantly, no matter how good a person you are, no matter how religious you are, what a good mother you are, what a good cook, no matter what it is you do that you are excellent at, at that point that you tell someone you are a prostitute you become a scum of the Earth. In general you are instantly degraded for that to the bottom of the barrel.”

So why would Eden—so smart and capable—choose work that generates such hostility in the outside world such that even someone as fearless as she is balks at mentioning her work to people? “There are three factors. What order they go in, I don’t know. It varies day by day. To me money is a factor, to me being able to use my sexuality in a positive way for me appeals to me, too.” She then turns silent for a full minute. I can see in her face that she is struggling for a way to express the third factor, and I try to imagine what it could possibly be and draw a blank. When she starts talking again it is without her usual lucidity. Her sentences start, then stop, then try again. Yet this is clearly the most important thing of all to her:

“Third, um. Then probably third. Probably.” There is another long pause. “I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to have somebody thank you for being so nice to them and making them feel so good … um … making them appreciate life again. I mean, I have had someone say to me that coming out here … Someone can enjoy themselves enough to go back to appreciating life. I have had someone say something that deep to me. Sometimes people come out here and you personally create a life-altering experience for that person. That to me is very rewarding.”

This is Eden’s story of that customer:

“A gentleman came out here. He was probably about 60. We went back and I gave him a menu. He says, ‘No, this is going to be a special situation.’ I’m like, ‘OK, just talk to me.’ He proceeded to tell me it was the two-year anniversary of his wife dying of cancer. Since she had passed away he had not been able to get past the fact that he loved his wife and that she is gone. He had not been able to have any relationships or to allow his life to move on because he had this guilt. He said, ‘I am trying to make my life go on and to believe that just because my life goes on I don’t love my wife any less. I picked you because my wife had red hair and was built like you. You actually resemble her. All I want you to do is just lay here next to me and let me hold you. I don’t need you to talk to me or do anything. I just want to lay here and hold you and think of you as my wife and think about how much I loved her and what she felt like to me. I just want to say my good-byes to the only woman in my life.’ We had no sexual contact whatsoever. He lay there for an hour and he held me in a spoon position, and he just cried. It took everything I had not to wail, but I figured that I couldn’t break down because I was there being strong for him.”

Eden kept in touch with the man until he sent a final e-mail telling her that he was remarrying and thanking her for helping him begin to move forward.

The girls frequently develop friendships with customers that can be hard for an outsider to fathom. One of the few customers willing to talk to me was Ernest, 37, of Las Vegas, a contractor with sandy blond hair standing about 6 feet 2 inches tall with a bit of a belly. He was Diamond’s friend though not her customer—well, not exactly. “I don’t party with her,” Ernest says. “I did a two-girl party once with her and she was in the way and so technically I never partied with her. She’s not my type.” Rather Diamond is charged with picking the girl for Ernest to party with.

Ernest and I are sitting at the bar discussing this while watching Diamond and Trinity play pool, and Trinity is topless, because those are the stakes, and she is losing. As Diamond had told me earlier, “Sometimes we have drinks and play pool and wait for guys to come in. I always beat her. Trinity is a good friend but a bad pool player.”

“Would you party with me?” Trinity asks Ernest.

His diplomatic answer: “I would have fun, but you probably wouldn’t be my type.”

“I knew it!” Trinity says.

I ask Ernest: “What’s your type?”

“I’ll tell you,” Trinity says. “He likes a little bit of an older woman.” Trinity is 21. Diamond is 25.

“Is that true?” I ask Ernest.

“I tend to enjoy myself more with the older women.”

The women here today range from 21 to 41.

Ernest recalls his first trip to Chicken Ranch: “I’d been divorced for awhile. I hadn’t been with anybody and so I decided to come out here. I was certainly nervous. I did the lineup. I’ve only done one lineup and that was the first time.” That was about a year ago. These days he drops by a couple nights a week.

Two more men come in for a barlor and the room fills up suddenly with girls. I ask Ernest how many of the girls now in the room has he partied with? He surveys the area and then to my embarrassment he points and starts counting out loud like the Cookie Monster: “Um, 1, 2, 3, let’s see, ah, 4, 5, 6. I guess around 7.”

Ernest uses all of the clichés to compare the brothel experience to the dating world: “The cost is about the same. I am serious. I am a numbers person, and I’ve gone through the numbers. I justify it. Here if I go back with somebody, I am going to be going back with somebody who I know is clean. That’s the main thing. But the other thing is that I get what I want. I usually get treated really well. I feel comfortable with a girl when I go back with her. There have been a couple times when I partied with a girl and I would never party with her again, but I never felt cheated. They are courteous. I feel like I am at home out here. Everyone treats me like part of the family.” But Ernest’s popularity has not come cheap: “Since December of last year I’ve spent about $12,000.” Still, not every visit is a party. “Sometimes I go months without a party.”

“Are you going to party tonight?” I ask him.

“I haven’t decided yet,” he says. He sips his beer, not taking his eyes off Diamond.

“When do you make the decision?”

“When the mood hits me. And who knows when that will be?”

Ultimately, the mood hits Ernest, and Diamond picks the third Musketeer, T., for him. “I picked her because she is an older woman and I thought they would have more in common than someone my age and that would make him more comfortable. I know what he likes and doesn’t like,” Diamond says.

The friendship between the girls themselves is less complicated and in many ways more intense because they live together in such close quarters for such extended periods of time. When I arrive, for example, Diamond has been working at the Chicken Ranch for over three months straight. “The first two and half months were a piece of cake, but now I am starting to get a little crazy. Sometimes I am not in the mood and sometimes I get irritated fast.” It is a position few could understand and this is how she defines the Three Musketeers:

“A couple girls came in and I got attached to them. We kind of hang out together, drink together and party together with guys. And of course, we watch movies on Lifetime. When you are down and out they are like family who are in the same business. They can tell you how to get through it. And we can be there to give each other support. It is a bond that we make between us three.”

But even among the girls who don’t seem particularly close there are surprising relationships. Eden and Diamond appear polar opposites. Think what you want of her work; Eden is sophisticated, thoughtful and articulate. Diamond is brash, tough and has a street education that at first appalled me with some ignorant comments she made about HIV positive people. I never once saw Eden speaking to Diamond or to any of the other Three Musketeers. I didn’t see Eden so much as glance at the television that Diamond seems to watch with every free moment of time available to her. I thought of them as residing in different universes even within the limited space of the brothel. I assumed in fact that they probably did not even like each other. Even Debbie remarked at the contrast: “Diamond is more a little-girl personality whereas you have Eden who is more serious.”

Then one night Eden takes me aside:

“This is going to surprise you. But you would never guess that one of the girls I am closest here with is Diamond. It surprises me. We are so different. I don’t think we would have ever become friends if we had met outside of here. But we share a bathroom here and we are both neat freaks. She and I both tend to earn a lot of money and so there are occasionally jealousy issues with other girls. We have that in common. I am picking her up at the airport when she next flies out next time, and she is spending the night at my place.”

The friend I see Eden spend most of her time talking with is Aspen. Eden, in fact, talked Aspen, whose previous work experience was as a sixth-grade teacher, into coming to work at the Chicken Ranch. “Yes, I recruited Aspen,” Eden admits with a laugh. “She is a personal friend of mine back in Vegas, and once I got to know her I figured out she was very open, very nonjudgmental and very sexual. I had been telling her I was a stripper when I was actually out here. But when I got to the point that I was comfortable with her and I told her what I did, she thought it was really neat. And at that point we talked openly about it, and she thought it would be interesting to try and do just for the experience. So she came out here with me in January and really liked it.”


• • •

It was Aspen who wound up being picked from the lineup to take care of a severely handicapped 32-year-old man whose parents took him to the brothel. I found out from Eden later that the father— on vacation from Florida and who I couldn’t help notice was bedecked in gold neck chains that suggested finances were not a serious issue for the family—lowballed Aspen on the price. While Aspen was with their son the parents watched television in the bar. Their son had very limited use of his hands and feet and as the parents worried that Aspen would charge more to dress him afterwards, they suggested she send for them when she was finished so they could put his clothes back on.

“His parents told me what he wanted,” Aspen explained to me later. Aspen thinks the man was probably a virgin though she is not sure. “He told me, ‘I don’t have a girlfriend. I probably won’t ever have a girlfriend.’ So, I really, really wanted him to have a good time. I wanted it to be a very good experience for him so he would have that memory.”

“Eden told me you weren’t paid very much?”

“No I wasn’t.”

“She said it was the lowest you could take.”

“Well, yes, but …”

“But nothing. I saw the chains around the dad’s neck. That family could have paid you a lot more.”

Aspen sighs: “I gave them a range and they went to the lower end. But they weren’t asking for anything outrageous and he was very nice, a very bashful man. The parents wanted me to come get them to dress him. But I thought if I could undress him I could dress him again. I just thought it would be more comfortable for him if I did it. And I did it. It was no problem.”

“And you didn’t mind going the extra mile for people who didn’t want to pay you a penny more than they could get away with?” I ask.

Aspen waves her hand dismissing the notion and then she says: “I think he probably has the heart of a trouper himself. In some strange way I was grateful, because he reminded me of my husband.”

It is one of those many moments at the Chicken Ranch where expectations, preconceptions and everything else explodes. “Excuse me?” I ask.

It turns out that Aspen is a widow. “My husband wasn’t quite like that, but after he had a stroke he lost a lot of the use of the left side of his body.” Aspen took care of her husband for three years like that before he passed on in 2001. Because she is widow of a man who knew he was dying, Aspen was taken care of financially to some extent. She is one of the few girls at the Chicken Ranch who is definitely not there primarily for the money. She too is seeking to explore her sexuality, though she does admit to earning good “furniture money” for her house.

Over days living with the working girls if I formed one real bond, it was with Aspen. I tell Debbie that Aspen is the sort of person who I would be friends with in the “real world.” It is the truth. Aspen and I spend hours talking and very little of it winds up being about the Chicken Ranch. We both like Edgar Allan Poe, can spend an afternoon discussing Shakespeare, have an interest in biblical scholarship and enjoy debating philosophy. We get each other’s taste enough to recommend books to each other. Not that we are identical. Aspen enjoys karaoke and has a fondness for Meatloaf’s singing that I find hard to abide. But one night, sprawled on the floor of Aspen’s room listening to Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited (someone has to save her from a life of Meatloaf fandom) I feel exactly like I am back at my college dorm hanging out in a friend’s room. When the bell rings for a lineup it is a shock to be reminded that in reality I am sitting in working girl’s room in a brothel in Nye County.

Yet, as diverse as all the working girls I meet at the Chicken Ranch are, I do notice that there are some similarities. Aspen is not alone in possessing a nurturing personality. Even Diamond, when asked what she would like to do if she could choose any career answers without hesitation: “My dream is to go to college so that I can be a nurse.” This desire to take care of people is perhaps the greatest vulnerability the working girls share. And it is exploited.

Many of the girls have boyfriends and husbands and about the only common denominator among them: None of the men in their lives seem to have regular work. Of course, one has to be careful about stereotyping; there were many working girls at the Chicken Ranch I did not speak with and some girls I did interview chose not to discuss their private life at all, a decision that was respected. Some girls put up a valiant fight, too, claiming that their man was needed to watch children (as if millions of single parents don’t pull that miracle off each week and work, too) while they were under lockdown, or that he was engaged in crucial home- improvement projects that otherwise would need to be paid for by a contractor (another feat pulled off by millions of working folks who keep the registers at Home Depot humming), or, perhaps, he is needed to handle the time-consuming task of paying bills and running the business affairs for a girl while she was at the Chicken Ranch (all of which can be done from the brothel thanks to phones and Internet access, not to mention: How could the few things left be too much to allow time for a job?). There were other answers, too. All foolish.

I tell Debbie that I have noticed a pattern. “That’s just part of life and you can’t judge them for that,” Debbie says. “I learned early on that there was part of me that just needed to understand. If there was a girl who was willing to discuss her personal life with me she had to take whatever feedback I had or whatever questions I wanted to ask. But I gave up asking those kinds of questions, because there is always a reason. To me, ‘Why does he not he have a job?’ you just take as part of the business. And after awhile you just don’t pay attention to it anymore, it just doesn’t faze you.”

And, when Debbie says she doesn’t judge the working girls, she means it. She stops me cold when I offer my theory that on some level the answer to why men are able to accept their girlfriends/wives working at a brothel is that they are living off the proceeds. “That’s a difficult area,” Debbie interrupts. “I am not going to try to figure it out. I gave up trying to figure it out. There’s a lot of things I gave up trying to figure out years ago and that’s one of them.”

Trinity is one of the few girls who is single and so is willing to discuss it. I ask her about the dismal employment rate among the partners of working girls. “Pretty much, yeah. A lot of times the other half chooses not to work because we woman make enough. We make a lot of money.” Trinity estimates her monthly income at $9,000 to $12,000 a month. Another girl tells me she shoots for $500 for each day she works. Another is preparing to leave after an extended stay with close to $40,000 saved.

Of course, only the more successful girls are willing to talk to me about their earnings, and there are plenty of whispered horror stories of women who don’t earn enough to cover their room, board and bar tab (girls drink if they want to, but not to excess). Not making enough to cover those bills, by the way, would be a good hint to get out of the business. Even Aspen, who is a relative newbie with only a half-dozen trips to the brothel (most lasting only a couple weeks) has had just one day when she did not have at least one customer. Few jobs make it easier at giving you the news that it is time to stop. It is certainly true that I had less sex—none, yeah, you needed to know, didn’t you?—than any other resident in the history of Room 7 at the Chicken Ranch.

But one thing my time at the brothel taught me is that nothing is straightforward, no judgment fully comfortable to make once you allow yourself into the details of a brothel’s reality. Even something as seriously twisted as lockdown occasionally has strange benefits. Debbie points out: “I’ve seen girls come here who have a pimp. They come here and they start to get a clearer picture of the controlling abuse and the negatives that guy is having on their life. Because they are away from it and they can see it. And the girls support each other when and if they are fed up with the man. I’ve seen that a lot.”

Of course, one person’s idea of a pimp is another person’s spouse and the distinction can be a very slender one in relationships where the man produces no income. Besides, lockdown can place significant stress on even the most stable relationship. Eden and Aspen (who met the man she lives with now about a year after her husband’s death) have both been with the same partner for years. But they admit the topic of whether their boyfriend cheats during the weeks while they are out at the Chicken Ranch is one they can’t stop talking about with each other. And Eden and Aspen both have seen plenty of cheating husbands at the Chicken Ranch. Both, of course, tell me that they are sure their man isn’t a cheater, though Aspen seems to have more conviction on this point than Eden.

But mostly it is the little indignities of lockdown that are so hard on the girls; even meals take on ridiculous importance. Debbie puts it this way:

“I try to impress upon a new cook how important meal times are to a girl, because of the fact that they are locked up in here, they look forward to their meals. That is the one thing that changes every day in their life.”

Debbie’s mom Joan is a cook, and says, “Out here they like spaghetti. They like meatloaf with mashed potatoes and gravy. They like fried chicken and Mexican. I cook for them like I cooked for my family.” Many girls also snack from one of the stocked refrigerators, and all say they gain weight at the brothel.

Still, while it seems trivial, Diamond and Trinity got very excited Sunday afternoon when I offered to bring them back whatever they wanted when I decided to make a run to Subway. On my way out I remembered one of the dozen rules was “Check in with the shift manager anytime you want to do something not covered here.” So, thinking it routine, I asked at the shift office when I went to be buzzed out of the gate. Debbie wasn’t around, and there was a change going on in shift managers. Standing with them was an office employee. But when I asked about bringing back some subs an intense three-way conversation broke out (one shift manager was inclined to say yes, and the other no with the office worker firmly disapproving to shift the balance). Permission was denied. Still in shock I find Diamond, who didn’t seem at all surprised by the decision. “Don’t worry about it. Don’t get yourself in trouble,” she tells me.

This is typical of the flip side of lockdown. Whatever the legitimate arguments for the practice, the prostitutes at a brothel on some level should always be treated as adults who are at work. Yet a shift manger has it in her power (they are all women) to treat an employee more like a prisoner than an independent contractor who is residing at her work location. The humiliation of this sort of treatment can sometimes be staggering to outsiders. I can almost see the sign on the cage: DON’T FEED THE HOOKERS. The power that brothels wield over the working girls who reside there can land in ways that are as overwhelming as they are arbitrary.

In the end, I smuggle back a contraband Subway sub for Diamond and Trinity to split.


• • •

My time at the Chicken Ranch was clearly coming to an end, and not just because I proved unable to follow the rules for more than a few days. On Monday a new batch of girls arrived for quarantine and Debbie had not prepped them for a reporter living at the Chicken Ranch. Their hostility was palpable. For the girls who had existed under lockdown for days straight before I arrived that Friday afternoon, having me around had turned out to be a novelty, but for these new girls, having a guy in one of their rooms was a distraction at best and at heart seemed to throw off the balance of their private space.

I realize now that Debbie had not been exaggerating when she spoke about how much effort it took her to get the working girls to be OK with my being at the Chicken Ranch these few days. It probably didn’t help that a girl who has been assigned to Room 7 was being forced to live in a bunk bed (she was quarantined still, and could not work so didn’t yet need the room) in another room while waiting for me to vacate so that she could set the place up as she wanted it. Though I had agonized about if it would be perceived as rude to bring my own sheets to the brothel (ultimately deciding not to do so), most girls bring way more than sheets; they completely personalize their rooms from the drapes to the art on the walls.

So on Tuesday morning I pack up my stuff to vacate. It is Doctor Day and Eden, Aspen, Trinity and Diamond all are on their morning excursion to Pahrump. I decide to wait for them to return to say farewell before leaving. But just as they get back my friend John arrives at the brothel with a friend of his I don’t know. We are all sitting in the bar when the unthinkable happens; he starts to behave like a customer, and not one of the nicer ones. First he demands a tour of the brothel. Then after ordering a drink he begins to crack witticisms like, “How much would you charge to let me fart in your face?” Having already introduced him as a friend I decide the only thing to do is just slink out the door like anyone in the midst of a shame spiral. And I make it as far as the front porch when Aspen calls me back to the door of the parlor she has raced around the bar to get to in order to catch me before I escaped beyond the gate, outside the range of her lockdown.

“Hey, don’t sneak off. It’s fine about your friend. We get stuff like that all the time. Maybe you’ll write something that helps people understand us better.”

“I am really sorry about John.”

She reaches over and pulls me into a quick hug. It is my first physical contact at the brothel. We say nothing for a moment. We are both looking over at Meow Meow, who is making a rare afternoon appearance on the porch where her food bowl is kept under a chair. Inside, I can hear John’s laughter. He borrowed some cash from me before I left (an accident in Southern Nevada took out the ATM that morning so he can’t use his card) and I wonder if he’ll wind up spending it. I feel bad keeping Aspen since I hope she gets his money as much as anyone. They all deserve it for putting up with him. “What a strange way for your story to end,” she says

“No,” I tell Aspen, “This is the perfect ending.”

I reach over and hug her back and then head to my car

Las Vegas Weekly. All Rights reserved

Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988, porcelain.
DOUGLAS M. PARKER STUDIO/BROAD ART FOUNDATION, SANTA MONICA/©JEFF KOONS

The Selling of Jeff Koons

He made banality blue chip, pornography avant-garde, and tchotchkes into trophy art. How Jeff Koons, with the support of a small circle of dealers and collectors, masterminded his fame and fortune

By Kelly Devine Thomas

E arlier this year some of the most powerful players in the art world attended a 50th birthday party for Jeff Koons, the controversial art star who rose to fame in the 1980s. Jeffrey Deitch, who helped bankroll Koons’s ambitious and outsize “Celebration” series and nearly went bankrupt for it in the 1990s, hosted the party at his SoHo gallery, where examples from Koons’s oeuvre were projected on large screens and miniature versions of Balloon Dog, an iconic work, were handed out as party favors.



Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988, porcelain.
DOUGLAS M. PARKER STUDIO/BROAD ART FOUNDATION, SANTA MONICA/©JEFF KOONS
Among the high-profile museum directors, curators, artists, and collectors in the room that night were Koons’s longtime New York dealer Ileana Sonnabend, with whom he has worked on and off since 1986; Larry Gagosian, who recently began showing Koons’s new works and is now producing his “Celebration” sculptures; Robert Mnuchin, chairman of C&M Arts, which hosted a comprehensive Koons exhibition last May; and dealer William Acquavella.


The deep-pocketed gathering was indicative of the level of support currently invested in Koons, the former Wall Street commodities broker who has polarized opinion in the art world for more than two decades and whose pieces have fetched as much as $5.6 million at auction. Koons disappeared from the art-world radar for much of the 1990s, when he went through a messy divorce and struggled to deliver his “Celebration” series—sculptures and paintings depicting toys and childhood themes blown up to fantastical proportions, such as the ten-foot-tall, stainless-steel Balloon Dog that weighs more than a ton. “He has a vision that goes beyond his collectors,” says Gagosian. “It’s a huge vision, and it’s out there. But he connects the dots in one of the more interesting ways I’ve seen.”


Koons’s auction prices skyrocketed in 1999, when newsprint magnate Peter Brant paid a then record $1.8 million at Christie’s for Pink Panther (1988), a sculpture of the cartoon character hugging a buxom blonde, which was the first of Koons’s major porcelain works to appear at auction. Before 1999 his highest auction price was $288,500. Since the Pink Panther sale, more than 15 works have been auctioned for more than $1 million each. Four years ago Norwegian collector Hans Rasmus Astrup paid a record $5.6 million for Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), which was originally priced at $250,000, and last May financier Thomas H. Lee paid $5.5 million for Jim Beam J. B. Turner Train (1986), which was originally priced at $75,000.


How did an artist who sold his works for relatively modest prices two decades ago reach such peaks? Collectors, dealers, curators, and auction specialists who spoke with ARTnews say that Koons has masterminded his fame and fortune through a combination of charm, guile, and a talent for creating expensive art that inspires critical debate. Despite repeated requests, Koons declined to be interviewed for this article. “As Koons likes to point out, someone in every generation has to be held up as a shining example of what is wrong with current art,” Paul Schimmel, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, once observed. “It is a dirty job, but Koons, who has the single-mindedness of a missile, has taken on the duty. Koons’s conceptual strategy is to reveal his ambition.”


Koons has achieved his ambition, sources say, with the help of a close circle of dealers, including Sonnabend, Deitch, Gagosian, and, more recently, Mnuchin, as well as a core group of collectors, among them, Brant, Los Angeles real estate developer Eli Broad, Greek construction tycoon Dakis Joannou, Chicago collector Stephan Edlis, and Christie’s owner François Pinault, who have made him a cornerstone of their collections and continue to acquire many of the new works that come out of his studio.


Over the years, Koons has persuaded patrons to pay for the fabrication of his sculptures, which can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He has limited supply by placing these works with important private and public collections from which they are unlikely to be sold; and he has created artworks whose seductive surfaces, expensive scale and quality, and flawless execution cast them as luxury consumer objects. “He is a trophy artist,” says Chicago dealer Donald Young, who worked with Koons on his 1988 “Banality” series. “And he isn’t against being a trophy artist.”


While artists typically separate art and money, Koons’s art addresses market forces head on. Says art historian Robert Pincus-Witten, director of exhibitions at C&M Arts, “Jeff recognizes that works of art in a capitalist culture inevitably are reduced to the condition of commodity. What Jeff did was say, ‘Let’s short-circuit the process. Let’s begin with the commodity.’”


As Dan Cameron, chief curator at New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art, notes, “If all you want is a good time, he won’t let you down. But underneath the primitive thirst for delight and pleasure in his works, I think he is deeply engaged in some philosophical questions. Both Marxists and kids can enjoy it.”


Critical response to Koons’s encased vacuum cleaners, floating basketballs, gilded celebrities, and stainless-steel and porcelain tchotchkes has been extreme. Even his fans have had trouble reconciling their love-hate relationship with him. Peter Schjeldahl, now an art critic for the New Yorker, once proclaimed, “Jeff Koons makes me sick. He may be the definitive artist of this moment, and that makes me the sickest. I’m interested in my response, which includes excitement and helpless pleasure along with alienation and disgust . . . I love it, and pardon me while I throw up.”


Koons, who was born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania and lives today in a 13-room town house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, came of age as an artist during a decade when contemporaries like Julian Schnabel were aggressively promoting themselves, eager to expand their markets to the level of music and movie legends. Koons’s breakthrough exhibition took place in 1985 at International with Monument, in the East Village, when the neighborhood was the haunt of collectors like British advertising mogul Charles Saatchi on the hunt for young talent.


Koons moved to New York when he was 22 and got a job selling memberships at the Museum of Modern Art. His earliest supporter was dealer Mary Boone, who met him in 1979 when she bought his green Mercedes as a birthday gift for Schnabel. Boone sold two of his works—to Saatchi and collectors Donald and Mera Rubell—but after a year Koons left her for dealer Annina Nosei, with whom his relationship was also short-lived.


Koons’s work, with its roots in Pop, Conceptual, and Minimalist art, was out of step with the brash Neo-Expressionist style of artists like Schnabel and David Salle, which was in favor at the time. Frustrated by a lack of sales, Koons moved to Florida in the summer of 1982 to live with his parents and save enough money to move back to New York in the fall.


For the next few years, he personally financed his art by working as a Wall Street commodities broker. Koons has said he spent a lot of his time at Smith Barney consumed with a new series of sculptures, calling physicists to help him figure out how to suspend basketballs in water.


“Equilibrium,” his groundbreaking 1985 show at International with Monument, included basketballs floating in aquariums, lifesaving devices cast in bronze, and reproductions of Nike advertisements featuring black basketball stars. The basketball tanks, in editions of two, originally sold for $3,000, and the lifeboats, in an edition of three plus one artist’s proof, sold for $8,000, but those prices doubled within a matter of months. In recent years a lifeboat and an aqualung have sold for about $2 million each at auction. Less in demand are the basketball tanks, whose top price at auction is $244,500, because, sources say, they are difficult to maintain and the balls deteriorate.


“With Jeff Koons, I was absolutely obsessed,” says art adviser Estelle Schwartz, who placed about a dozen works from “Equilibrium” with clients. “I was a more voracious collector than even my clients. I remember saying to a collector, ‘If I’m buying a snorkel vest, you should be buying an aqualung.’”


“Equilibrium” set off a whirlwind of exhibitions by Koons. Between 1985 and 1991, he showed five distinct but often overlapping series of works at galleries across the country and overseas. He also began to work with multiple dealers, including Daniel Weinberg of Los Angeles, who, like other dealers who have worked with Koons, helped the artist fund his ideas in exchange for a share of the profits.


Over the past two decades, Koons, who has been quoted as saying that the “great artists of the future are going to be the great negotiators,” has built what he describes as a power base. “I have a platform now,” he told an interviewer in 1990. “I have all the support possible, as far as a stage for Jeff Koons to do his work.”


In addition to an increasing number of dealers who compete to handle his new works and buy those that appear at auction, Koons convinced collectors Joannou, Brant, and Broad, along with dealers Deitch, London’s Anthony d’Offay, and Cologne’s Max Hetzler, to invest heavily in the fabrication of the “Celebration” series. Koons began the series after his ex-wife Ilona Staller, a Hungarian-born porn star in Italy, and the inspiration for Koons’s sexually explicit 1991 “Made in Heaven” series, left him in 1993 and took their son to Italy, sparking a long-running custody fight.


Koons has always acted as the head of a complicated operation that requires the cooperation and support of many people, but never before on the scale required by “Celebration,” which Koons has said was an attempt to communicate with his estranged son. Deitch, Hetzler, and d’Offay funded the project in part by selling works to collectors before they were fabricated. But the sculptures, which were sold for between $1 million and $2 million in the late 1990s, proved more difficult and expensive to fabricate than anticipated.


Eli Broad paid for Balloon Dog (1994–2001) and Cat on a Clothesline (1994–2001) in 1996, but he didn’t receive them until 2001. “Jeff won’t let go of a work until he thinks it’s perfect,” Broad says. The delays tested his patience and required more money from Broad, who declined to specify what he paid for them. He says he didn’t threaten to take legal action against Deitch, Hetzler, and d’Offay but did make his expectations clear. “These were three responsible dealers, and we had a contract where they had to perform.”


At one point, more than 75 artists were working for Koons around the clock as he tried to finish the project in time for a “Celebration” exhibition at the Guggenheim, originally scheduled for 1996 but repeatedly postponed and ultimately canceled. “It was a pure panic situation,” says an artist who worked for Koons at the time. “I would get a call from a manager saying that they’d run out of money and were going to have to shut down the studio for a week or so.”


In the mid-1990s, Koons sold most of his artist’s proofs to Broad and others to help finance his work and pay his bills. Broad bought three: Rabbit, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, and St. John the Baptist (1988). Says Sonnabend director Antonio Homem, “Jeff is an extremely romantic artist. He is ready to ruin himself and anyone involved with him for an artwork to be what he wants it to be. He wants it to be beyond perfection. He wants it to be a miracle.”


In an extreme example of his attention to detail, Koons insisted about two years ago that Broad’s Balloon Dog, which had been exhibited at several major museums, be repainted a different shade of blue, at Koons’s expense.


Koons did not exhibit a new series of work for much of the 1990s, when the slow production of “Celebration,” caused what Brett Gorvy, Christie’s international cohead for postwar and contemporary art, describes as a “cloud of confusion to hang over his market.” He reappeared on the art scene with a new series of cartoonish mirrors and surrealistic paintings called “EasyFun” at Sonnabend in 1999, the same year that two of his major works appeared at auction.


When the nearly life-size Buster Keaton (1988) was offered at Christie’s in May 1999, it ignited a bidding duel between d’Offay, who bought the work for $409,500, and Philippe Ségalot, head of Christie’s contemporary-art department at the time, who was bidding on behalf of an anonymous client. The competition for Pink Panther was even more intense six months later, when it doubled its estimate of $600,000 to $800,000.


Exhibitions of Koons’s works in the past five years have often coincided with the appearance of high-profile works at auction. Most of the art in the C&M Arts show last May—the same month as Christie’s well-publicized sale of Jim Beam J. B. Turner Train—was on loan from Brant, Edlis, Sonnabend, and other public and private lenders. Few of the works were for sale, but the exhibition set new price levels for those that were available. Mnuchin, according to sources, sold Wall Relief with Bird (1991) for about $2 million, three times the price it sold for at Sotheby’s five years ago.


A 1993 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was Koons’s last major museum exhibition in the United States, despite the Guggenheim’s desire to present a retrospective of his works. “The question of a retrospective is still ongoing,” says Guggenheim deputy director and chief curator Lisa Dennison. “Determining the point when you want a retrospective that sums up your career is a tough one for any artist. I think it’s particularly tough for Jeff.” Sources say that Pinault—who has been approached about financing a new sculpture of an intermittently chugging train engine suspended by a 150-foot crane—plans to open his art foundation in Paris in about three years with a major Koons exhibition.


A much-delayed exhibition of the “Celebration” sculptures, most of which went directly into private hands and have never been shown as a group, is at least 18 months away, says Gagosian, who is still financing the production of some of the works and selling them for $2 million to $6 million.


While critics over the past 20 years have faulted Koons for debasing art with consumer fetishism, his supporters say they believe he is one of the most important artists of his generation.


“I think it was hard in the 1980s to take seriously a man who was saying that banality is the white elephant of our culture,” says the New Museum’s Dan Cameron. “But I think in 2005 we’re moving closer to Jeff. I think we’ll look back and say that he had it right on the money.”

Kelly Devine Thomas is senior writer of ARTnews.

This article has been edited for the ARTnews Web site.